a carriage-horse degraded to go in a cart. It feels its degradation, loses flesh, gloss, and spirit. I was one day walking with an old friend whom fate doomed to live abroad all his life, but whose heart was ever in his native land. We were strolling near an old mansion, in its park, when he stopped, looked at it, and said, "Ye gentlemen of England, that dwell at home at ease--and in what ease! in what peace and beauty! Indeed, I think that, as in all the world there is not a type of man nobler, better, more complete in every way than the true English gentleman, so do I think that nowhere--not approachably even, anywhere--is there to be found a house like the old English country house." And in my heart I responded, Amen--It is so. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [2] _Examples of Carved Oak Woodwork_, by W. Bliss Sanders. London: 1883. [3] Mr. Bliss Saunders gives details of one of these in the work above referred to. CHAPTER IV. THE OLD GARDEN. [Illustration] Just before the breaking forth of the French Revolution, the Abbé de Lille composed a poem in four cantos, entitled _Les Jardins_, in which he enthusiastically urged the abandonment of all formality in the laying out of a garden, and the adoption of the new English style of irregularity. "Avant de planter, avant que du terrain Votre béche imprudente entame le sein, Pour donnez aux jardins une forme plus pure, Observez, connoissez, imitez la nature." An agreeable wildness--that was what was to be sought. The Revolution came in, and hacked the gardens about, and reduced them all to the state of wildness. What the Abbé de Lille wrote against was the artificiality of the garden arrangement that had been in vogue till then. Horace Walpole had already written in the same strain. A rage had set in in England for remodelling the gardens, and the new fashion was called "English gardening." Pliny the younger, in his delightful letters, speaks of his gardens. As his Laurentine villa was his winter retreat, it is not surprising that the gardens there take no prominent part of his account. All he says of them is, that the _gestatio_, or exercise ground, surrounded the garden, and was bounded by a box-hedge; where the box had perished, there were planted tufts of rosemary. He mentions his vine-walk and his trees, mostly mulberry and fig, as the soil was unsuited for other trees. On his Tuscan villa he is more diffuse; the garden takes up a good part of the description. He tells of the strange shapes into which his box-trees were clipped, his slopes, his terraces, shrubs methodically trimmed, a marble basin, fountain, a cascade, bay-trees alternating with plane-trees, a long straight walk, from which branched off others hedged by apple-trees in espalier, and by box, and ornamented with obelisks. Something like a rural view was, indeed, contrived amidst so much artificiality, but was speedily forgotten amidst the stiff lines of box and the trimmed cypresses.